The Scientist on the Spectrum
by threedays
Summary: After a death Brennan perceives as her fault, she and Booth share a moment in the office.
1. Chapter 1

**The Scientist on the Spectrum**

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><p><em>Notes: I am new to this fandom. I have only seen Season Two, and the last episode of Season Six. (Wowzie wowza. What the heck HAPPENED between Season Two and Season Six?)<em>

_This story takes place in Season Two, since, you know, I've watched that season. _

_So digging this show!_

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><p>"It had to be <em>me.<em>"

She is positively vibrating with negative energy. Operating on a heightened frequency he can pick up across the room. Brennan tends to be a person who stills in distress. Booth doesn't like this nervous activity.

"It had to be me, of all people, he reached out to."

"Bones ..." His head tilts slightly, lowers so he can see her better. His expression is a cross between a wince and the faintest of sympathetic smiles.

"He had to pick the one person in the building who wouldn't – Why did he have to pick the person who was least likely to –" She is searching for words, a fight he is not used to seeing her undertake. Most of the time, she has no trouble finding words, and the only problem he has is that they are ten syllables long and are meaningless to him. Now she is spitting out random syllables and halves of phrases. He is uneasy.

"He must have thought I would understand." She stills then, all at once, and sinks into the chair, fixes her gaze on the surface of the desk. At a point somewhere beyond the surface of the desk. Her voice gets soft. Small. Flat in a way he has come to recognize not as an absence of emotion, but as an overload of it. "He picked the only person in the building who wouldn't understand."

"Bones."

She is still for maybe thirty seconds, while Booth shifts his weight, chews his lip, studies her. He is responding much more slowly than usual. He doesn't know what to say. She's right. She _is _the only person who wouldn't have recognized the reference in the final phone call from the serial killer.

Guy got his thrill from risking capture. In the sixteen months he'd been on the FBI's radar, it was his pattern to call the lead investigator just before murdering the victim. He would feed them some clue to the victim's location, usually in a riddle or a song lyric or movie quote, before setting up a potentially fatal situation – bomb with a slow timer, slow-acting poison, small fire – and leaving the victim to his fate.

Twice they had found the victim in time. Twice they hadn't. Three times now.

"Call never should have come to you in the first place," he tells her.

"I'm … aware of that, Booth!" The pause for a gulp. She seems hurt that he has pointed it out.

"What I mean is, he shouldn't have known you were working the case. I don't like that information out there. I'm investigating the case, he should have dealt with me. Never should have brought you into it." He feels like he has failed to protect her, not from danger this time, but from hurt.

She presses her lips together, looks sideways, out of her office. He can see sweat and a bit of blood on her forehead. He is sure he looks just the same, filthy and defeated. Maybe not quite so sad. It is her phone, not his, that rang at the eleventh hour. She is the one who misunderstood the clue. Who thought that "Houston, we have a problem" meant that the kidnapped man had been taken to Texas.

It wasn't completely illogical. The first two murders happened in Texas. By the time she'd chanced to echo his exact quote, they were twenty minutes in the opposite direction from the Air and Space museum, and already too late.

"The fact that you've pointed out it shouldn't have been me confirms I mishandled the call," she says, in a shaky voice, "I jumped to a conclusion."

He offers her something that is not quite a smile, given the circumstances. "Yeah, Bones, well, I've been trying to get you to do that for years."

"This is why I continue to resist," she says, and lets her head sink onto her arms.

He comes to sit across the desk from her. Picks up her pen and doodles on a notepad neatly placed next to the phone.

"I didn't know," she says into her arms. Then makes a small sound and picks up her head so he can hear her better. "I didn't know. I still don't know. I don't understand why you people, why everybody thinks it's okay just to reference things that – that you have no rational way of knowing whether or not your conversation partner has been exposed to. You just assume. You assume that everybody has had the same set of social and cultural experiences as you, which is clearly incorrect! I've never been able to grasp why pe- why you – why people -"

And then all at once, when he doesn't quite expect it, she dissolves into exhausted, defeated tears. Her hands raise as though she is handing the question to God, except of course she does not believe in God. Yet another way she is separate from his social and cultural experiences.

"Aww, come on, Bones." He reaches across the desk, touches her hair, pulls his hand back. He doesn't like feeling so far away from her, but he is not always sure what is okay to do when she's upset. She has a variety of types of upset. Sometimes she is rigid and resistant to touch. Other times she seems to need to be held so tightly it would be uncomfortable for a regular person. He is immediately ashamed of himself for thinking of her as irregular. But clearly, she is unlike anyone else he knows.

"He should have said what he meant," she says, almost pleading. There are echoes in her voice not just of this murder but of a lifetime of trying to figure out the meaning behind people's words. "Why can't people say what they mean? Particularly when a life depends on it?"

He doesn't have any way to make it easier for her, the disconnect between what people commonly say and what she is able to understand. She can look at a bone, free of its flesh for centuries, and give the person back their face and their name and the story of their death. But she cannot understand a movie reference. She is separated from her fellow humans by brilliance and brain chemistry and a possible autism spectrum disorder. She is lonely as the oldest, most forgotten bone.

"I understand the dead," she says, "because they don't speak in riddles. They can't confuse me with idioms or figures of speech. They can't lie." She stares away from him, always away from him when she is ashamed. "I cannot understand the living. And sometimes that is a life-or-death skill." Her voice gets quieter at every turn. "I got that man killed."

"The murderer," Booth says firmly, "got that man killed, Temperance. Not you." While he speaks, he stands and steps around the desk, leans backward against it. Chances to lay a hand on her shoulder. "Not you."

She shrugs off his hand and draws into herself. This is one of the no-touching days. He knows, then, that she will separate soon, even from him. She will go home and put on music loud enough to drown out echoes of a movie quote that keeps circling in her head. She will go home alone because she thinks she deserves it. She will study popular culture, not in a fascinated anthropologist way but in a desperate attempt to learn every movie quote and song lyric she might ever need to know when the chips are down.

When she realizes this is impossible, she will cry, alone in her apartment.

He can scarcely stand the thought.

"I'm going home," she tells him, quiet, and rises from the desk, and circles past him, leaving an arm's length of personal space around her.

"Let me drive you?" he asks.

She shakes her head and walks away, letting the distance widen between them.


	2. Chapter 2

_Notes: Thanks for the reviews, everyone! I'm hoping if I breach canon because of something that's happened in another season, or because I just don't know these people that well yet, you guys will gently correct me. Come on, public library patrons, turn in your seasons of BONES! I'm in the dark here!_

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><p>She was nine years old the first time it dawned on her that she was different, that her<em> brain <em>was different. Nine years old and standing alone in the corner of a park, surrounded by stones organized by color, texture, size, and general location of discovery.

That year, she wanted to be a geologist. The year before, she had wanted to be a geneticist, had spent the spring predicting the colors and patterns of litter after litter of impending baby cats. There were a slew of strays in the neighborhood and it was not hard to lure them close enough to study. But Russ kept sneaking behind her and dumping the food she left out for them. Brothers. It was difficult to maintain enthusiasm for a project when you were constantly being sabotaged.

She sits awake for half the night, thinking of that bright-eyed nine-year-old in the park. The one who thought the other kids were approaching to look at her rock collection. To share in her wonder of nature and science.

Later, at the water fountain, washing off the blood before her parents could see it, she knew she had been stupid, literally giving them ammunition. She didn't even know those kids, didn't know why they felt like they had to prove their superiority. Okay, so maybe she recognized a feature or two. Crooked nose or frizzy hair. She couldn't place them, didn't ordinarily see them at the park, so she didn't recognize them there. They belonged at school. She wasn't a snob. She would have recognized them at school.

She sits awake for half the night, nursing bruises she thought had healed. Logically, she knows that her intellect is worth far more than any social skill she might be lacking. Social skills, after all, do not solve murders, or return faces to the faceless after decades or even centuries of anonymity. What she does is rare, while social skills are a dime a dozen – a figure of speech she has finally learned after repeatedly checking the prices of things.

Of course her intellect cannot sit with her when she is upset, or talk her out of the guilt and self-loathing that comes with having a lost life weighing on her conscience. This is one of those rare times when she wonders whether a balance would have been better – a little less intellect, a little more humanity.

Tears come at last, and this is good. Tears are human. Not that she is so out of touch that she thinks of herself as _in_human. Clearly she is a human. Her biological attributes tie her irrefutably to that particular species. But she finds it comforting, at times like these, that she is able to do, as Booth puts it, "what people do."

Only a few of the tears are for the dead man. She feels guilty. Not enough of the tears are for the dead man.

More of her tears, right this second, are for the nine-year-old, dodging stones, desperately scrambling to put them back in order. She wanted to write down her method of organization, but the throws were coming so quickly and she was bleeding and someone had taken her pen, and she knew it was a losing battle, trying to catalog her research, knew these other children, these mean little children had ruined her research and her morning and her favorite shirt.

The hardest part, at nine, was understanding that the other kids didn't care about the science. Even Russ, who gave her his baseball jersey and hid the bloody shirt before their parents could see, didn't care about the science. He only cared about his oddball of a baby sister, crying not because she was injured but because some filthy rocks got scattered.

She has never made much sense to anybody.

The phone's ring startles her out of her tears, which have nearly dried up anyway. It isn't logical to cry over something that happened more than two decades ago. Not when so much has happened since.

She picks up the phone, answers with, "Brennan," even though she knows it is Booth and Booth calls her Bones. She has always liked the nickname, likes the intimacy of having a nickname, even early on when it bothered her on some level. Russ had nicknames in high school, and Dr. Saroyan thought of Zacaroni and Hodge Podge. It has never occurred to her to call Booth by a nickname. She wouldn't know how to even think of one.

"Hey, I forgot to ask you, I wanted to, uh -" He has clearly forgotten to get his story figured out before calling her.

"You wanted to make sure I'm not sitting awake at two seventeen in the morning, upset because my lack of awareness of the common entertainment methods of my fellow man ended the life of one such creature?" She is overly formal on purpose. Longer words are safer when she is upset. They keep responses at bay.

She hears his breath. She marvels that she understands what he is doing. She knows he is taking that breath to buy time – really, why do so many figures of speech have to involve money? – because he wants to say something that will make her feel better, and he doesn't know what that is yet. She finds it easier to understand Booth's motivations than to understand anyone else's. Even her own, sometimes.

"Yeah." He finally decides on the truth, and she is glad. He likes to joke, and avoid, and evade. But he is straightforward just often enough.

"I'm fine," she says, which is both a lie and an evasion. There are moments, then, when it is _too_ easy to do what people do.

He breathes again. She waits for him to speak.

"I know you are," he says easily, as though this is not even in question. "I'm just up, you know, figured you might be. Wondered whether you could stand a little company."

She thinks about kids with rocks. Ruined shirts and stolen pens. The loneliness of intellect when you've got nobody to share it with. She opens her mouth.

Then she thinks about how she _handed_ the rocks to those children. How she misunderstood their intentions and she ended up getting hurt. She closes her mouth again. She doesn't know what she should do.

She decides that it is her turn to buy time. And she has just the currency. "If I were going to give you a nickname, what do you think it would be?" she asks him, knowing full well that this is an illogical place for the conversation to go. There is a slight thrill in being illogical, like she is dressing up for Halloween.

He laughs a small half-laugh that she has come to find comforting. "What?" She reads both bewilderment and affection in his tone, hopes she is reading the latter correctly.

"A nickname. Like Zacaroni or Hodge Podge or … or Bones. What would yours be?"

"See, Bones, the thing about a nickname is that it's something you give somebody else." He is always game to explain human nature to her, even out of context at two twenty-one on a Friday morning. He is as willing to explain human nature to her as she is to explain forensic anthropology to him, and they understand each other just about as well. "You can't ask a person to give themselves a nickname. It just sort of happens. It's not really … planned … What is this about?"

"I don't know how to give nicknames." She is beginning to regret broaching the subject, but she can't seem to let it go.

"Well … that's okay." She knows it is impossible to hear somebody shrug, but the image comes to her mind so clearly that she knows that's what he's doing.

She can't help but smile. "Yeah … I know it's okay. I'm just curious. What do you think your nickname would be? If I … you know. Gave you a nickname."

There is a pause. In the silence, she can picture him running one hand through the back of his hair. She has come to know his mannerisms quite well. "Bones …"

"You can't imagine me calling you by a nickname, can you?" she asks after a minute.

"I really can't," he says. "Booth works fine. So is that a yes or a no on the company?"

She closes her eyes. Pictures herself, age nine, with a fistful of rocks. Loosens her grip.

"I would love some company," she tells him.


End file.
